Jan Verellen

Jan Verellen studies how people learn — and how they come to be measured. He spent nine years at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium, graduating with two very different master’s degrees: one in Physical Education & Movement Sciences, the other in Business Engineering. Along the way, one question took hold of him: why is studying treated as something to be endured, rather than a craft a person can actually get good at?

Chasing that question, he taught himself to learn far more efficiently — cutting his own workload to a fraction of what the system assumes an “average” student needs, while still graduating and living well. Learning, it turned out, is not a gift some are issued at birth. It is attention, memory, method, and the quiet confidence that ability can be trained.

That idea would not let him go. It traced back to something smaller and older: a classroom, a number written in red, and the lesson — absorbed early — that a person can be weighed, ranked, and told in advance exactly how far they will go. Following that thread outward, from a single desk to the systems that arrange the wider world, became Thrones of the Invisible: a history of “divine power” — the machinery that presents its own design as destiny — and of the fixed-mindset society built on the belief that minds are finished early.

Thrones is written for adults. But its hopeful half — that there is always more than any number can hold — is meant for everyone, and so it grew two companions: Wonder, little illustrated stories for ages 6–11, and Learn, the same ideas told for older students and grown-ups. Together they are a single argument, pitched at three ages: the mind is not fixed, and a person who has felt their own mind change is far harder to convince that the world’s hierarchies are the only ones nature allows.